The Eater of Darkness, page 9
It is not a deed for silence and he looked up at her face bent down over the oh! Pregnable bastions of her breasts.
“Everybody does, silly!” her voice not as it should was saying. She swept her skirt aside with two hands so that it arced across where (childishly it seemed) bare and tightened waterly over the slope of the thighs.
A dawning maliciousness he read on her face; her eyes were dark with tyrannous expectation. The moment was mal à propes but:
(Without more ado he had clutched and like corseting between his two thumbs the flesh inside her leg yielded up to his lips: he kissed. Something swelled and liberated within him. From now on the little blood-clot would be like a machine: so soft the flesh so indecently soft in its cushioning elasticity that he could bite now to the bone to find some stiffness meeting his: in its cleaving depths he could let his jaws clinch together (and releasing watch the sudden white and the following flowing red that would wave into the bluish hollowed teeth-marks under the film wet from his withdrawing mouth) and:
“Now you’re being naughty!” she had said but a gloze of red (as if rending across his eyes) before the unstable whiteness of her skin. He put his arms around her knees and tightened to weaken her columnar uprightness as one might uproot a monument but:
“No! You’re hurting me!” with the other arm (but her hand had (caught his arm: he) stared at her face without seeing: it was not yet time but) awkwardly. “I told you to stop!” she had cried and, “I wouldn’t have come her with you if I’d thought you were going to act like that!”
But:
◆
* * *
And:
◆
* * *
Then:
◆
* * *
Afterwards and all that had flowed away and they were sitting on some coarse crisp yellow grass on the edge of the rock. The valley came up at their eyes like a rush of air. There was an as it seemed specially provided dusk and a slow-motion Albany steamer amid a diagram of ripples was headed interminably upstream. It is browlike. As when (slowly) in darkness one comes to perceive the objects about him (but this darkness that we know redshot and dancingly as the woman Time jogs on her elbow) he discovered himself lying on his back with (she was lying beside him smiling) New York shiningly like a brushstroke long yellow across the lower sky.
◆
* * *
She was satisfied but he felt her to be an intrusion but her legs crooked about his consciousness.
◆
* * *
He thought of the Old Gentleman. Murder, like the villain in the piece, he dragged a little theatrically across his mind. It was only to give a semblance of importance to his complete comfortableness. Besides, somewhere in that shuttling strip of (picked out with purple) yellow an unknow [sic] man 3 millimetres tall sat in his window looking out at the Palisades and:
◆
* * *
“What shall I call you you are not Cousin Herbert of course you know I know that?”
◆
* * *
“Your eyes are like Lake Geneva deep at their bottom is a floor of ice in their cooling blueness my red thoughts are refreshed I would wound you.”
◆
* * *
“Your eyes are like the daisies of the field you see thousandly and your breasts on their red-blue hubs are as two white chariot wheels that roll me beneath your body.”
◆
* * *
“Your breasts are like the prows of two pink ships that plunge creaming into my heart’s center.”
◆
* * *
“It’s beautiful here isn’t it I’ll tell what we’ll come here some night and I’ll do my dance for you!”
◆
* * *
“Your shoulders cape about me like the flower of Isis their fragrance shuts out light and darkness through the coiled channels of your navel I shall blow kisses to your heart.”
◆
* * *
“Your navel is the pin-pricked center whence your beauty is the radius of my world your hips I see faint with many colors are the ovate cup of my desire.”
◆
* * *
“Your hips are as a vase my glory my pride my courage shall find root and flourish there.”
◆
* * *
“I think men are so silly they always want to argue about something even when it’s about me I find it tiresome but I love you but I could hurt you.”
◆
* * *
But and both talking neither hearing the other a man had appeared behind them a man black against the sky and from his pose the tapping stick one saw he was blind and deaf and voiceless. Neither saw him. He stood outlined black against the sky. “Death is a complete quiescence,” thought McDowell and, “Man, no more than a tree, a stone, shall ever suffer death, save in part, and glancingly. After vomiting, for instance. Not unwisely, in an earlier day, did they speak of men vomiting forth their souls. And the more intimate ejaculations as well. So the seed of life is death and of death, life. X within O—that is the symbol of the universe.” And:
◆
* * *
“Your hips are like the soil of Heaven your legs like the branching of two white rivers enclose the island of my paradise.”
◆
* * *
(Sometimes (I think it was I who sat there on the Palisades and lying beside me that wide-cheeked soft-lipped deep-eyed loose-bodied slut waiting smiling for my (or for his) caresses and) sometimes) Charles Dograr: thrillingly and afar he had for a moment heard the march of Life about him (or was it the tapping stick McDowell?) and with a sense of infinite foreboding he had (as you (or I) sitting here in our orchestra chairs (suppose you or I) were to rise and step forward to the scene taking the place of the hero?) Charles in a mood of deep profundity: “I shall not live long,” he had said: “in no one of my dreams can I see myself old I shall not live long not more than 250 pages”: he had said and (suddenly (dazzledly) [sic] as one rising from (is it the Seine this long blue laughing?) from the water’s depth into shattering sunlight he (thrusting up through the perfume of some unknown woman’s hair her body sweeter far than he) found himself) sitting there and:
◆
* * *
Imperceptibly the Night brooding from the trees (the Night) kneading the white woman’s body graying into the gray receiving earth and:
◆
* * *
“Death encases Life,” and McDowell and: “Man loves not so much with the desire to be a father as to be a grandfather. We progress in alternate interlacing loops, the body the adumbration of the sequitive [sic] sperm. Life is an entail on the estate of Death,” and:
◆
* * *
The blue the (drifting he knew it was Sunday and) “Adeline! Adeline!” he cried frenziedly. She raised her head to stare at him. “This is the last time! My youth is passing. This is the last time! The last time!” and:
◆
* * *
McDowell had stepped unperceived (and touching his tapping stick her breasts her body her belly) and:
◆
* * *
“I was not made for finality I’ll wear my white dress when we come again, and:
◆
* * *
“The last time! This is the last time! and (bloating before (his eyes rent apart) the white the (he stared a moment down to the twisting membranous structure) and then: “This is the last time!”) it was (he saw distinctly) a fountain blue-white shot from the wound: rose quivering. It sprayed out across the sky. The drops fell: becoming petals; becoming plunging flames: canopied down on her. He was (sprawling on four legs like an animal) regarding nothing.
McDowell had gone on. His stick tap-tapping receded among the cliffs. Charles Dograr saw nothing. There was a flash of satiny white among the trees.
“Adeline! Adeline!” he called into blankness. He rose and fled.
She heard his footsteps tumbling away among the rocks. A dark stranger came and stood by her side.
10—EIGHTEEN MEN
It was in Stockholm that I met Fernand Leger, and under rather amusing circumstances. I was strolling one morning on the Bradgvur, that most charming of all promenades, when a small man, with narrow head and lank black hair, approached me. I saw at once that it was Leger, and assumed that he, though we had never met, had also recognized me.
“ ‘He accosted me, and with any prelude, demanded, “Are you a philistine?”
“ ‘It will perhaps be understood that I did not ‘catch on’ at once. He was evidently quite terribly in earnest–so much at least was clear.
“ ‘ “Why—why—” I stuttered, when he cut in abruptly: “Well come up to my studio and take a look at my cat. I’m afraid it will die!”
“ ‘Naturally I went—not to see the cat, but to see his pictures, and was amply rewarded. As it turned out, of course, the explanation was simple, as all explanations are. In his excitement, coupled with his lack of facility in the Swedish tongue, he had confused the word for philistine—‘Sturvagsdt,’ with ‘stavgardt,’ meaning veterinary!
“ ‘Nevertheless,—as Leger himself admitted when I laughingly taxed him with it—the incident has to me always seemed a strikingly just epitome of his artistic principles. …’ ”
There was a long vague pause for fumbling among the leaves. “M-m-m-m., … ah!” and—
“ ‘. . . was his terse and nervous prose, and his astonishing gift of mother-wit, rather than any social graces, that procured Max Beerbohm his invitation to the soirée at the d’Alençons, for he had an unpleasant tendency toward kleptomania that made his friends a little uneasy in his. …’ ”
“Here!” said Charles. “Let me read it myself.”
Asa Huddleberry, filled with a bulbous delight, handed over the manuscript. He was a critic on the Forum, or was it the Dial?
“What do you think of the title?” he demanded. “ ‘From A Critic’s Diary’—eh?”
Charles looked up to find the man’s large, flaccidly intense eyes swelling at him. He laid the bulky sheaf on the floor. “Oh. …” he said.
I have remarked that sometimes I think it was I who sat one rose-scented evening on the Palisades beside the girl Adeline and indeed in many ways this Charles Dograr was very like myself.
He was awkwardly conscious of people. He felt ticklishly their glances. He was lumberingly docile at times and at times fanatically precise.
His morals, his ethics, his philosophy had not as yet sharply emerged for his mind was still clouded by strange, voluminously sweeping ideas of which his most tenaciously revered was a belief that the operation of the world’s forces on him would combine in his own preservation and advancement. He had abiding faith in his own ability and in what we (but he never) would call his luck. And he forced himself almost consciously to strengthen that faith, with a vague sense that if he could make it strong enough not even Fate would have the heart to disabuse him of it.
This childish tendency to animate the inanimate—to motivate the immutable—to render scrutative the inscrutable–was everywhere characteristic of him. If people seemed poignantly alive to him, objects and even objectives were more than alive. Four thousand years ago he would have been a priest of Isis; and now not a packing-box, not a cobblestone of the roadway, still less the Force that made his ambiance, but was endowed, in his philosophy, with Mind and Will.
The effort of his logic was to discover, not the reason, but the reasoning of Things.
Nevertheless, the murder of Edward Trulge, coupled with the two or three that swiftly followed (into collusion in which he had been so cleverly tricked by the old gentleman) had disturbed him greatly. But now he was sitting in Asa Huddleberry’s studio in the rooming house, listening with marcescent interest to the other’s volubility.
“I should like,” Huddleberry was saying, “I should like to write a detective story—a mystery story. … But one in which no one should know what crime had been committed—nor who had committed it. …”
“That’s true of all crimes, isn’t it, rather?” asked Charles and watched himself inject a careless laugh, like a hypodermic, into the man’s mind. But:
“No one. … There should be a dream quality about it all. …” His eye lighted; a rising enthusiasm informed his customarily level tones and he waved his long thin hands in wider gestures—“A dream quality, yes; a brooding sense of Something—no one quite knowing what–but Something dread, and menacing, and terrible. A Something that sets all the boasted power of civilization at naught—,” he raised his hand as Charles gave evidence of being about to speak, “—at naught, and mocks the puny strength of men. …”
“After all,” murmured Charles comfortingly to himself, “how puny the little things really are. I do get foolish about them.” He looked with renewed lightheartedness at Huddleberry, lying there on the crimson chaise longue, the thin figure of him wrapped in his purple dressing gown, and almost took out his pencil and note book like a reporter, as the man went on.
“It shall be my greatest work, that. I see them now in my mind’s eye, my characters as I shall write them—small, busy important silhouettes against the black shadow of Fate. … They move about, fussily occupied with their lilliputian affairs—beautiful fragile women … men evanescently powerful in the affairs of nations themselves soon—ah! soon to crumble into the forgetting dust. … Men, women. …”
“Don’t you think,” cut in Charles, forgetting he was interrupting, for a new idea had struck him, “we often confuse permanency with importance in a curiously illogical way? Isn’t it often the very impermanence of the thing which makes its importance?
“Man lives his slender span and dies—and it is just that his span is short which gives his death real importance. That’s why fresh strawberries are important. A hundred years’ erosion crumbles a tower, and so does a thunderbolt—in half a second—and therein lies the importance of the thunderbolt. How unimportant man would be, if he lived a thousand years!
“But still. … A telegraph pole, for instance. … No. … And yet …” He relapsed a moment, and the Great Critic, seizing the occasion, went on:
“Men, women, statesmen, courtesans, plotters. … and yet, in the mind of each the dread questions are constantly impending—‘What is it that threatens?’—‘Who the murderer?’—‘Where the scene of the tragedy?’—‘Shall it be I who will strike the fatal blow?’—‘Or shall I receive it?’ …”
He paused again, staring dramatically at the corner of the ceiling. “And the end—dramatic, inevitable, but veiled in mystery. … ‘Was there a murder?’—‘Who was the victim?’—they shall ask, my characters. And as each sinks shudderingly to sleep—‘Was it I who killed, last night as I thought I slept?’—‘Am I, even now, am I dead?’ … Ah! Yes! It shall be my greatest work, that. It would go well in the American Mercury, don’t you think?1
Charles, who had been chewing his underlip this while in a meditative frenzy, now sprang suddenly to speech. “No. …” he cried. “Don’t you see? As I said, a telegraph pole is permanent. If anything could make a man important, it is his impermanence. And it does, among his fellows. You carry a basket of eggs more carefully—but not because they are more important—than a basket of potatoes. The eggs, however, seeing themselves cushioned with straw and handled gently, are likely to get pretty pompous about it. So with ourselves. Man’s great fragility, and the consequent delicacy necessary in handling a human being lest one inadvertently destroy him, lead us—though quote fallaciously—to consider him very important indeed. But it is when man tries to struggle with true permanence that he becomes ridiculous. Even in small things—as dozens of people have pointed out. For instance: every locomotive that is built means that all men die a little. Do you see what I mean?”
He looked up hopefully. The afternoon trembled. Huddlebery [sic] was frowning.
“What,” he asked, “has all this about locomotives got to do with my story?”
“Oh!” Charles re-collected himself, as after a leap. “The story. … Murder, wasn’t it? I think there are only two people who could write a murder story—the murderer and the victim. For example,” he had risen and was at the door, “suppose I were to commit a murder tonight, I would probably then be able to write a good story—from the standpoint of the murdered. If I murdered you, then you would be in the best possible position to write from the standpoint of the murderer.”
“Oh! Well,” Huddleberry commented petulantly. “If you will try to be clever. …”
“Not at all!” Charles himself had been frightened by the sudden firmness of voice as he had pronounced the words. Huddleberry, however, had not observed. He went away relieved, dragging the bloody word behind him.
That night, however, after the switch had been closed for the eighth time, and Charles still was fiddling with the adjustor-screws, the old gentleman remonstrated mildly.
“Not that I mind,” he explained, “only the continued drain on the current might cause comment. That light-box uses a powerful lot of juice. What is it, my boy?”
